Friday, July 2, 2010

Philippa Levine: "Veneral Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire: The Case of British India."

Journal of History of Sexuality, Vol. 4, 4. April 1994, pp. 579-602

Over 200 per 1000 British troops had to be hospitalized for venereal disease in India during the late 19th century. (Levine suggests that the figure might be inflated)

Two classes of "registered" prostitutes -- 1st class (service English men), and 2nd class (service local/native men). There were also poor women who sold themselves to Europeans for less money. One rule instituted by the British banned female grass-cutters from working on the grounds of military cantonments.

Women registered as class 1 prostitutes were forbidden from having sex with Indian men. One prostitute was in 1887 point fined 2 rupees for doing so (in Kasauli). In actuality, the boundary between the two classes wasn't strict, Levine suggests.

Women who registered themselves as prostitutes had to submit to a genital examination to prevent the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea. This was justified by the British administration as not being too rude for Indians (see quote below).

Military cantonments actually had officially designated areas (Lal Bazaars) where prostitutes lived. Sometimes they were given free housing.

Lord Kitchener in 1905: ""the common women as well as the regular prostitutes in India are almost all more or less infected with disease.""

They spread the rumor that syphilis contracted by "Europeans from Asiatic women" was more severe than that contracted from European women.

Despite the colonial government's best efforts it's not clear that brothels were racially segregated. There were European women working in them as of the late 19th century, though government officials wanted to believe that they were mostly Eastern Europeans and Jews.

Indian Contagious Diseases Act (Act XIV of 1868):

The colonial enactments aimed at controlling female prostitution andcurbing venereal disease, especially among the British military, differedin important respects from their domestic cousins. Enacted principallyin the 1860s, at the same time as the British acts, almost every Britishcolony acquired regulations governing the behavior of prostitute womenas a measure against the encroachment of syphilis and gonorrhea. InIndia two major legislative measures-both assuming this direct relationshipbetween the fact of prostitution and the transmission of disease-were introduced in the mid-1860s. The umbrella CantonmentsAct (Act XXII of 1864) organized the sex trade within military cantonmentsas part of a broader regulation of commercial activity within themilitary towns. Four years later, the Indian Contagious Diseases Act (ActXIV of 1868) enacted similar provisions for the supervision, registration,and inspection of prostitute women in major Indian cities and seaports.

Registration under the Contagious Diseases Act:

Not surprisingly Indian women were subjectto closer control than were British women.23 The three British acts(1864, 1866, and 1869) limited registration to women apprehended bythe police on suspicion of prostitution. In India, however, permission toengage in prostitution was premised on self-registering. This may seema small thing, but it rests, I think, on huge assumptions about "Eastern"morality. The rhetoric of the British legislation remained doggedlyattached to the possibility of redemption, and women hospitalized fortreatment of venereal disease were subjected to religious and moral in-struction and urged to remove to refuges and asylums upon cure andrelease.

Genital examinations:

A common theme, constantly contradicted by complaints and petitionsfor exemption from unhappy women, was that the internal genitalexamination, which lay at the heart of all the contagious diseases actsand ordinances, was regarded with nonchalance in India. "The specialsensibility of European women ... as to corporal examinations, whicheven with them does not generally extend to the class of prostitutes, isabsent among the same class in India. . . . The regulation of courtezansin the public interest offends no native susceptibility.

Free housing/ lal Bazaars:

In military cantonments women usually were restricted to what wereeffectively areas of regimental brothels, often known as lal-bazars, andin some cases were provided with free housing from which to conducttheir business. At Saugor, a cantonment in the central provinces underthe Bombay command, twelve free quarters were reserved for registeredwomen in the Sudder bazaar in the very year in which the ContagiousDiseases Acts were repealed in Britain.

How to incite fear in the solider -- tell him nightmare stories about the syphilis he'll contract:

Syphilis contracted by Europeans from Asiatic women is muchmore severe than that contracted in England. It assumes a horrible,loathsome and often fatal form through which in time, as years passon the sufferer finds his hair falling off, his skin and the flesh ofhis body rot, and are eaten away by slow, cankerous and stinkingulcerations; his nose first falls in at the bridge and then rots andfalls off; his sight gradually fails and he eventually becomes blind;his voice, first becomes husky and then fades to a hoarse whisperas his throat is eaten away by foetid ulcerations which cause hisbreath to stink. (from Kitchener's Memorandum to the Troops, 1905. Cited in Levine, 592)

The thin color lines -- between European and Indian women in brothels:

The European prostitute, byher very presence, challenged white supremacy in distinctive and criticalways, which reveal dramatically and vividly the importance of sexual politicsin colonial rule.55 Despite the attempt to segregate Europeanservingand native-serving brothels, it was widely acknowledged thatmany women rarely heeded these niceties of distinction unless compelledto do so. In consequence, reality held out the possibility that Europeanwomen might, in fact, sexually service Asian men.

Sister Blog - Project Space

This is a sister blog of sorts to my main blog, which you can find here. I am using this space as a kind of research chalk-board, not focusing especially much on readability or narrative completeness. You can also find me at Twitter @electrostani